Our new workstations arrived today and I began setting up one of them. They are a massive improvement over our previous systems but about 75% the power of my reasonably powered home PC at about four times the cost and I am skeptical that they will last the 40 months asked of them.  This after my request has several corners shaved from it for trivial cost savings.  I did some initial benchmarking and my very excited boss asked for feedback about their speed.  I was unsure of how to respond and the revision history of the email was something like this:

While sufficient to run AutoCAD I don’t think they’d run Crysis as well as you’d like.

They’re fast enough that I no longer realize how much slower they are than my home PC.

They are sufficient, for now.  Please plan to upgrade in 18-24 months.

While an improvement over what we have, I’m glad they didn’t come out of our department’s budget.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the monitors included displayport adapters.